Bill Gates: Miami's beaches will be all gone because of climate change

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“There will be places near the ocean [that] the sea-level rise will completely wipe out,” Gates told me. “You know, like Miami won’t look anything like it does today. Those beaches will be all gone.”

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“Well, it’s fairly gradual, it gets worse every year. You know already in Miami you have periods where the water is coming up when you get the right weather conditions. And so, every year, the ocean will just get higher and higher. And by the end of the century, that’s very, very dramatic,” he told me.

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“I love the beaches in Miami, you know, biking, walking, it’s so beautiful, and all the energy of people there,” he added. “And I think, wow, that won’t be there. You know, it’s kind of a sad thing. It’s not the highest on the list of bad things from climate change, but it makes it something that we can relate to.”

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There will be increasingly stronger hurricanes, floods, wildfires and extreme droughts, mass migrations, economic crises and deaths from natural disasters. By 2050, climate change is likely to be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly, he says.

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Unless we dramatically increase efforts to reduce climate change — beyond the ambitious gas-emission reduction goals of the 190-country Paris Climate Change Accord — the world faces a “climate disaster,” Gates says.

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Expanding current sources of green energy, such as wind and solar, will not suffice, he says. That’s because these energy sources are intermittent. The wind doesn’t always blow. The sun doesn’t always shine. And we have not yet invented affordable batteries that can store enough clean energies.

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In addition, the Paris Accord’s goals are too modest to solve the problem, Gates says, adding that the only sensible goal is to reduce emissions to near zero by 2050.

He compares existing global agreements to reduce the effects of climate change to a bathtub that is slowly filling up with water: Even if you slow the flow to a trickle, the tub eventually will overflow.

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